Theresa May's 'meritocracy' is a recipe for Darwinian dystopia

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British Prime Minister Theresa May delivers a speech at the British Academy where she said that a new wave of grammar schools will end "selection by house price" and give every child the chance to go to a good schooCredit:
2016 Getty Images

“I want Britain to be a place where advantage is based on merit not privilege; where it's your talent and hard work that matter, not where you were born, who your parents are or what your accent sounds like.”

Let me cut to the chase: I think meritocracy, of the form Theresa May sets out in that quote, is one of the worst, most wicked and deplorable political ideas ever produced. Indeed, it is such a bad idea that no-one actually believes in it, even though almost everyone says they do.

Let’s see why. In a meritocracy, those that rule should be the most talented and hard-working, and which jobs people get should reflect their talent and hard work, yes? So, the engineers paid the most or with the most interesting jobs should be the most talented and hard-working engineers.

But it doesn’t stop there – after all, May’s speech was about education. So, in a meritocracy, those who get to be educated and trained to become the most talented and hard-working engineers in the first place need to be those with the most innate talent and hard-working-ness. It wouldn’t be a “meritocracy” if we just said that A) the best engineers get the best jobs, but B) becoming the best engineer depends on what your family, friends and co-religionists do for you. The very essence of a meritocracy is that each of us must flourish or fail purely on the basis of our own individual merits. Those who love or support us in other ways must not be permitted to boost us, relative to others more talented than ourselves.

So now we see the scheme in its full, appalling horror. It is a vision of a society in which personal biology is everything. If your biology makes you clever, beautiful or interesting and gives you good digestion and a winning sense of humour, you will succeed. And if you are dull, plain, bad-tempered and sickly, you will fail — indeed, you must fail — and no-one is allowed to help you.

This vision of a Nietzschean dystopia, in which biological merit is all, where everyone stands alone and philanthropic assistance is nullified, is so appalling that no-one, in practice, actually believes in it. No-one really wants to live in a meritocracy. It’s just one of those stupid terms that’s somehow entered the lexicon unchallenged, and everyone now thinks they have to say they believe in it.

If this were merely a matter of terminology — if people actually meant something else by “meritocracy” when they said they believed in it — that might be relatively harmless. The problem, though, is that policy-makers are so attached to the term and the concept that they allow it to colour their thinking and policy-making.

A classic example of this was David Willetts’ notorious speech on grammar schools in 2007. In that speech he argued a downside of grammar schools was they enabled parents who cared more about their children to help those children achieve more than parents who did not care about their children. You see there the meritocratic impulse infecting the policy very directly. He thought it counted as a weakness if an education system allowed more loving parents to help their children!

What I think people really mean when they use terms such as “meritocracy” or “equality of opportunity” is that they want there to be lots of opportunity for those from less privileged backgrounds to get ahead. But “lots of opportunity” is no more the same thing as “equality of opportunity” than, say, “lots of income” is the same thing as “equality of income”. Indeed, quite the reverse — creating opportunities often makes opportunity less equal (e.g. think of scholarships).

We should want a society of “us-es” — my family as an “us”; my circle of friends as an “us”; my church as an “us”. “We” should be able to seek to flourish or fail in collaboration. My family should be able, in collaboration, to help each other to do better than we would as individuals. And the same applies to friends or co-religionists or other social groups. The “meritocratic” concept that sub-groups of society should be forbidden from assisting one another is an appalling, authoritarian vision that we should all stop pretending to support.